By Rachel Kovaciny
Setting a new marksmanship record wasn’t on Billy Dixon’s mind that summer morning in 1874. He was focused on survival.
Dixon and a couple dozen friends were surrounded by 700-1,000 native warriors (Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa) fighters led by the fearsome war Chief Quanah Parker. This war party assembled with the express purpose of driving all white settlers from the Texas plains, later known as the Red River War. A medicine man called White Eagle rode with them who claimed to be able to protect warriors from bullets. Emboldened by their belief in his powers, the war party targeted the small trading post of Adobe Walls. They were confident of an easy victory, for there were usually only ten to fifteen people there.
Adobe Walls stood north of the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle, in what is now Hutchinson County. This settlement boasted several stores, a saloon, a blacksmith’s shop, and a picket stockade surrounding parts of the outpost. These buildings were built of adobe, with walls about two feet thick.
That June, a wagon train brought Adobe Walls news of Indian attacks on hunters and far-flung homesteads, and swelled the population to twenty-eight men and one woman. It included Bat Masterson, only twenty years old and yet to make a reputation for himself as anything but a buffalo hunter, and Billy Dixon, a buffalo hunter and entrepreneur a couple years older than Masterson and already well known for his sharpshooting skills.
Around 2 am on June 27, a loud cracking noise woke everyone. Some thought it a gunshot, while others were convinced the ridgepole of the saloon’s sod roof was about to break. Men set about shoring up the roof, just in case, while others got an early start on their business for the day. Whatever that noise had been, it saved the settlement, for it meant everyone was on their feet at dawn when Quanah Parker’s war party attacked.
In his memoir, Billy Dixon described the attack as hundreds of warriors in full battle array, mounted on war horses, swooping down on the settlement from the east while the sun rose behind them, so that the war party “seemed to emerge from this glowing background.” The settlers weren’t expecting an attack, and the native warriors surrounded the buildings, getting close enough to beat on windows and doors with their rifles and clubs.
Most of the men in the settlement were buffalo hunters, equipped with “buffalo guns,” mainly large-caliber Sharps rifles. Such long-range weapons were useless against attackers in close quarters, so the besieged relied on whatever pistols and repeating rifles they could scrounge up. These proved sufficient to push back the first attack, and then they could use their long-range rifles instead.
Although the native warriors carried off most of their own casualties, as was their custom, fifteen died so close to the fort during that first attack that they could not be retrieved. Three men inside the trading post were killed the first day, and another died two days later.
The war party formed a ring around the outpost, firing at the settlers and gradually withdrawing to beyond the range of ordinary rifles. In the late afternoon, some men from Adobe Walls ventured outside to bury their dead. The next day, several more buffalo hunters reached the outpost, and Henry Lease volunteered to sneak away and ride to Dodge City for help. Two hunters also slipped away to warn other outposts about the war party.
On the third day, Quanah Parker, White Eagle, and a dozen other war chiefs gathered on a bluff overlooking Adobe Walls, a mile away, to discuss the siege. The chiefs were dissatisfied with White Eagle’s claims that he could protect them from bullets, since fifteen of their warriors lay dead around the outpost. White Eagle promised that they would soon defeat the white settlers. As he finished his speech assuring the chiefs of victory, the warrior Ton-han-kah toppled from his horse. It took four seconds for the sound of the rifle shot that had struck him to reach their ears.
From inside Adobe Walls, Billy Dixon had just set a record for long-distance shooting. He was renowned as a skilled long-range marksman, and some of his friends had been encouraging him to see if he could fire a shot that would reach the war chiefs looking down at them from that far-away bluff. Feeling his own .44 Sharps rifle would not reach that far, Dixon borrowed a .50 Sharps rifle and took careful aim. He said later that he had not picked out one specific target, but fired what he hoped would be a shot that could at least reach them.
Reports vary whether his shot killed Ton-han-kah or only struck his arm and knocked him from his horse. Either way, the sudden discovery that the settlers possessed firearms that could reach them from so far away convinced Quanah Parker to withdraw his warriors and find someone else to fight.
After the battle, U.S. Army surveyors measured the distance of Billy Dixon’s shot at 1,538 yards, only 600 feet short of a whole mile. Dixon never bragged about this shot, calling it a “scratch shot” and saying he had been lucky. He devoted less than a paragraph to the incident in his memoir. But the shot’s fame didn’t need his efforts to grow, and it is still listed among the longest recorded sniper strikes.
A few months later, Billy Dixon and five other men earned the Medal of Honor for their participation in another battle with Quanah Parker’s warriors in the Battle of Buffalo Wallow. In later years, Dixon married and settled near Adobe Walls, where he served at various times as the postmaster, the first sheriff of Hutchinson County, and justice of the peace. Billy and Olive Dixon had seven children and eventually moved to Oklahoma.
Billy Dixon died of pneumonia in 1913, not long after his wife finished helping him record his life story, which Olive had published as Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon in 1914. He is buried near Adobe Walls, which is now a ghost town listed in the National Register of Historic Places, still best remembered for Billy Dixon’s marksmanship.
